Want 2020 vision? Secure your firm’s future with advisory

Actively providing your clients with more than just compliance work? Perhaps you recently rolled out advisory services, or maybe you’ve been doing it for a while now. Wherever you are in your journey, even if you’re still in the planning stages, advisory can secure your firm’s future.

Businesses and their owners need to have an accountant fighting their corner. Someone who can show them the impact of their decisions, and guide them towards the best course of action.

But so does your firm.

Advise your advisors

Think about how a typical advisory meeting with your clients would go. You’re likely to start by getting to know the business and its owner. You’re starting off on the front foot here, as you know your firm inside out.

Get your upper management all in one room and work out core goals for the coming time periods. Perhaps you want to hire a new accountant to help out with new services. Use the tools you use with clients to work out if it’s the right time to do so.

Do you have enough staff? Is it time to train up juniors? Answering questions like this puts you in the right mindset for really nailing advisory. And don’t forget that using forecasting and scenario modelling will help you see the impacts of such decisions.

Serve your firm as well as you would your clients

Just like you would for your clients, get your accounts on the cloud. If you’re using a third-party to help keep things ticking over in your firm then make sure you choose someone who shares your tech stack, or at least shares your drive to automate processes.

Never forget to focus on the future. You know where you want to be in the next year, five years from now and even up to ten years into the future.

But how are you going to get there?

Strategy sessions will see you through working this all out. You can use the brain power that’s in your firm to set out core KPIs to make your goals possible. When you need to achieve certain goals by certain dates, this is the best way to do it.

Above all else, get your team behind you. Team work, as they say, makes the dream work.

Make Futrli work for your firm

We’re going to run through a few tricks to make sure Futrli works for your firm, not just your clients. We actively run Futrli (the business) on the Futrli platform, because it helps us make the best decisions about hiring, getting new offices and more.

1. Forecasting should be centre stage

To reach goals and targets, forecasting will keep you on track. Getting yourself on a cloud accounting package is crucial, so Futrli can pull your transactional data in on a regular basis. As you’re working with real-time data, you can pivot and be agile, making decisions based on fact.

2. Regular update meetings

Whoever needs to be involved should be invited to meetings to regularly review progress. Tracking and monitoring KPIs will help you see a breakdown of the things that make your firm tick. When you’ve got a couple of months worth of data, you can benchmark your firm’s ideal figures and strive to beat them.

3. Set up automatic alerts

To boost your efficiency, set up some alerts in Futrli to let you know when you’re approaching thresholds and limits. The Futrli platform gives you the flexibility and freedom to monitor good news or bad news for any account, account category, KPIs, cumulative value alerts, transactional value alerts, multiple date ranges, and more.